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> when he went to stake his NFT, they asked for an approval for spending aETH from his wallet. Approvals such as this are normal when interacting with smart con

> when he went to stake his NFT, they asked for an approval for spending aETH from his wallet. Approvals such as this are normal when interacting with smart contracts, since the contract has to be "delegated" responsibility over the tokens in order to move them. However, what wasn't normal is that the approval was actually for Aave ETH. I'm a reasonably technical dude (senior data engineer at GAMMA/FAANG/whatever we're deciding to use nowadays), yet I don't have a damn clue what this means. And that's not an indictment of your communication. How on earth could I expect my wife, my brother, my parents, my kids, any of my friends, etc., to understand this? On the other hand, all these people understand the concepts of bank accounts, credit cards, fiat currency, etc. I'm open to learning more and having my views changed, but I'm so far convinced that there's absolutely nothing about crypto that is a simple, reliable, demonstrably real solution to a problem that isn't already handled by our current financial instruments.

Stevvo 5y ago
It is a specific technical detail of how ERC-20 tokens work. Your wife/brother/kids etc make transfers online from their bank account without knowing the technical details of how that transfer works. Ideally wallets would have better UX where concepts like this could be handled safely and in an accessible manner. I think crypto isn't really ready for general consumption yet.
- rnk 5y ago
  This discussion tells me once again that crypto today is similar to you have access to the backend systems of the bank and you can write database commands in sql that change things in your account records. It's insane low level access system. Transferring ownership of money via a webpage that has a source and destination on your bank webpage is understandable at a certain level. Is that the right source, is that the right destination. But you can put in 100,000 instead of 1k or 10k by accident. That's very different than if you click the 'ok' button it runs say random javascript like commands that the destination of the money wrote up. You can't ever expose that level to end users without it being an endless fraud source for people.

Stevvo 5y ago

It is a specific technical detail of how ERC-20 tokens work. Your wife/brother/kids etc make transfers online from their bank account without knowing the technical details of how that transfer works. Ideally wallets would have better UX where concepts like this could be handled safely and in an accessible manner. I think crypto isn't really ready for general consumption yet.

rnk 5y ago
This discussion tells me once again that crypto today is similar to you have access to the backend systems of the bank and you can write database commands in sql that change things in your account records. It's insane low level access system. Transferring ownership of money via a webpage that has a source and destination on your bank webpage is understandable at a certain level. Is that the right source, is that the right destination. But you can put in 100,000 instead of 1k or 10k by accident. That's very different than if you click the 'ok' button it runs say random javascript like commands that the destination of the money wrote up. You can't ever expose that level to end users without it being an endless fraud source for people.